The path to progress in Africa lies in the surprising and innovative solutions Africans are finding for themselves Africa is a continent on the move. It's often hard to notice, though--the western focus on governance and foreign aid obscures the individual dynamism and informal social adaptation driving the last decade of African development. Dayo Olopade set out across sub-Saharan Africa to find out how ordinary people are dealing with the challenges they face every day. She found an unexpected Africa: resilient, joyful, and innovative, a continent of DIY changemakers and impassioned community leaders."" Everywhere Olopade went, she witnessed the specific creativity born from African difficulty--a trait she began calling "kanju." It's embodied by bootstrapping innovators like Kenneth Nnebue, who turned his low-budget, straight-to-VHS movies into a multi-million dollar film industry known as Nollywood. Or Soyapi Mumba, who helped transform cast-off American computers into touchscreen databases that allow hospitals across Malawi to process patients in seconds. Or Ushahidi, the Kenyan technology collective that crowdsources citizen activism and disaster relief."
The Bright Continent" calls for a necessary shift in our thinking about Africa. Olopade shows us that the increasingly globalized challenges Africa faces can and must be addressed with the tools Africans are already using to solve these problems themselves. Africa's ability to do more with less--to transform bad aid and bad government into an opportunity to innovate--is a clear ray of hope amidst the dire headlines and a powerful model for the rest of the world.

Throughout the centuries, Africa has concealed multiple secrets, waylaying and confounding the unwary. Today, as economists, politicians, experts and the cognoscenti from within and outside the continent seek to "fix" Africa and its perceived problems, the need to understand its mysteries has never been greater.
Africa's future tells the tale of Africa's economic evolution, providing unique prisms through which to view the continent's panoramic story - ultimately one of triumph over the influences of nature and over multiple political tragedies. It explains how Africa in effect went backwards for one and a half thousand years, from the Roman Empire to 1500 CE. Only in more recent times has Africa gradually begun to evolve and grow, to the point at which its modern and archaic economies uneasily coexist today.
Modern Africa has developed diverse economic pathways to betterment - yet survivalist economies still litter the landscape. The continent's paradox of "subsistence with many faces" is manifested in its tiny middle class, its growing numbers of rich, and the ever-greater numbers of poor expected in the future.

The inspirational story of how an African-owned coffee company became a profitable global brand offers an argument for trade as opposed to aid, and a lesson in how Africa can dictate the terms of its future
Since it was founded in 2003, Good African Coffee has helped thousands of farmers earn a decent living, send their children to school, and escape a spiral of debt and dependence. Africa has received more than $1 trillion in aid over the last 50 years and yet despite these huge inflows, the continent remains mired in poverty, disease, and systemic corruption. Here, Andrew Rugasira argues that trade has achieved what years of aid failed to deliver, and has provided a tantalizing glimpse of what Africa could be. As he recounts the very personal story of his company and the challenges that he has faced and overcome as an African entrepreneur—from the impossibility of finding capital to discrimination at every step to close calls with lions in the foothills of the Rwenzori mountains—Rugasira discusses the barriers that currently prevent fair and equal trade between Africa and the rest of the world. He sets out the arguments for building a sustainable trade framework and reducing dependency on handouts, and he builds up a manifesto for a revolution in the way that Africa is perceived. (Released Date: September 24, 2013)

In an era of slowing growth, Africa is home to a trillion-dollar, resource-rich economy, and six of the ten fastest growing markets in the world. "Success in Africa" introduces the ambitious CEOs who are building the continent. These stories of growth, technology, and tradition bring life to one of the most important stories of the global economy: a successful Africa.
The CEOs of General Electric, The Coca Cola Company, and Tullow Oil join Africa's leading CEOs to share insights on what wins in this fast-growth market. With twenty years of experience in frontier markets, including a decade working in Africa, author Jonathan Berman engages with top business leaders on the vast opportunities and challenges of the continent. "Success in Africa" pushes past the headlines on Africa's growth to answer the questions often asked by companies and investors: Who do I work with there and what drives them? How do I deal with government? What about war, disease, and poverty? What about China? How do I win?
"Success in Africa" provides on-the-ground perspective, personal stories, and insight that Robert Rubin calls "essential reading for all who are interested in Africa for reasons of business, investment, policy, or curiosity."

Economic growth does not demand a secret formula. Good development examples now abound in East Asia and farther afield in others parts of Asia, and in Central America. But why then has Africa failed to realise its potential in half a century of independence? This book shows that African poverty is not because the world has denied the continent the market and financial means to compete: far from it. It has not been because of aid per se. Nor is African poverty solely a consequence of poor infrastructure or trade access, or because the necessary development and technical expertise is unavailable internationally. Why then has the continent lagged behind other developing areas when its people work hard and the continent is blessed with abundant natural resources? Stomping across the continent and the developing world in search of the answer, Greg Mills controversially shows that the main reason why Africa's people are poor is because their leaders have made this choice.

Corrupt, mismanaged, and seemingly hopeless: that's how the international community viewed Nigeria in the early 2000s. Then Nigeria implemented a sweeping set of economic and political changes and began to reform the unreformable. This book tells the story of how a dedicated and politically committed team of reformers set out to fix a series of broken institutions, and in the process repositioned Nigeria's economy in ways that helped create a more diversified springboard for steadier long-term growth. The author, Harvard- and MIT-trained economist Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, currently Nigeria's Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance and formerly Managing Director of the World Bank, played a crucial part in her country's economic reforms. In Nigeria's Debt Management Office, and later as Minister of Finance, she spearheaded negotiations with the Paris Club that led to the wiping out of $30 billion of Nigeria's external debt, 60 percent of which was outright cancellation.Reforming the Unreformable offers an insider's view of those debt negotiations; it also details the fight against corruption and the struggle to implement a series of macroeconomic and structural reforms. This story of development economics in action, written from the front lines of economic reform in Africa, offers a unique perspective on the complex and uncertain global economic environment.

The trade in oil, gas, gems, metals and rare earth minerals wreaks havoc in Africa. During the years when Brazil, India, China and the other “emerging markets” have transformed their economies, Africa’s resource states remained tethered to the bottom of the industrial supply chain. While Africa accounts for about 30 per cent of the world’s reserves of hydrocarbons and minerals and 14 per cent of the world’s population, its share of global manufacturing stood in 2011 exactly where it stood in 2000: at 1 percent.
In his first book, The Looting Machine, Tom Burgis exposes the truth about the African development miracle: for the resource states, it's a mirage. The oil, copper, diamonds, gold and coltan deposits attract a global network of traders, bankers, corporate extractors and investors who combine with venal political cabals to loot the states' value. And the vagaries of resource-dependent economies could pitch Africa’s new middle class back into destitution just as quickly as they climbed out of it. The ground beneath their feet is as precarious as a Congolese mine shaft; their prosperity could spill away like crude from a busted pipeline.
This catastrophic social disintegration is not merely a continuation of Africa’s past as a colonial victim. The looting now is accelerating as never before. As global demand for Africa’s resources rises, a handful of Africans are becoming legitimately rich but the vast majority, like the continent as a whole, is being fleeced. Outsiders tend to think of Africa as a great drain of philanthropy. But look more closely at the resource industry and the relationship between Africa and the rest of the world looks rather different. In 2010, fuel and mineral exports from Africa were worth $333 billion, more than seven times the value of the aid that went in the opposite direction. But who received the money? For every Frenchwoman who dies in childbirth, 100 die in Niger alone, the former French colony whose uranium fuels France’s nuclear reactors. In petro-states like Angola three-quarters of government revenue comes from oil. The government is not funded by the people, and as result it is not beholden to them. A score of African countries whose economies depend on resources are rentier states; their people are largely serfs. The resource curse is not merely some unfortunate economic phenomenon, the product of an intangible force. What is happening in Africa’s resource states is systematic looting. Like its victims, its beneficiaries have names.

countries to developing African nations has helped to reduce poverty and increase growth. In fact, poverty levels continue to escalate and growth rates have steadily declined—and millions continue to suffer. Debunking the current model of international aid promoted by both Hollywood celebrities and policy makers, Dambisa Moyo offers a bold new road map for financing development of the world’s poorest countries.
Much debated in the United States and the United Kingdom on publication, Dead Aid is an unsettling yet optimistic work, a powerful challenge to the assumptions and arguments that support a profoundly misguided development policy in Africa. And it is a clarion call to a new, more hopeful vision of how to address the desperate poverty that plagues millions.

In this thoughtful and elegantly written book, Kingsley Chiedu Moghalu explodes the myths and conventional wisdoms about Africa's quest for economic growth in a globalised world with a paradigm-shift perspective on the continent's future. Masterfully deploying arguments grounded in philosophy, economics and strategy across a range of subjects; from capitalism to transformation agendas, finance to foreign investment, and from innovation and human capital to world trade, he demonstrates persuasively how Africa's progress in the 21st century will require nothing short of the reinvention of the African mind.

In recent years, technological advances, higher commodity prices and a global thirst for energy have meant that African oil and gas are increasingly in demand. Countries as far apart as Niger, Uganda, Chad, Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania are looking at the prospect of almost unimaginable flows of money into their national budgets.
But the story of African oil has usually been associated with disaster - older producers such as Nigeria, Angola and Cameroon have little to show for the many billions of dollars they've earned, and oil money has been shown to fuel conflict and corruption, creating a so-called 'resource curse'. In this revealing and insightful book, former BBC correspondent Celeste Hicks questions the inevitability of such an outcome, revealing what the discovery of oil means for the ordinary Africans through original testimony from those working in the oil industries and the communities that surround them.
A much-needed account of an issue that will likely transform the fortunes of a number of African countries - for better or for worse.